Wednesday, 21 May 2014

Being the
experienced road-warrior of the information highway I am certain you are, dear
reader, you’ve probable come across a peculiar online meta-movement known as
‘The Dark Enlightenment.’ If you haven’t been introduced, allow me the honours.
The Dark Enlightenment isn’t a political party or a front or even an organisation,
it’s a loose collection of ideas and ideologues, self-described as
‘neo-reactionary’, a somewhat paradoxical turn of phrase, to be sure. It is
very difficult to define The Dark Enlightenment (though here is an attempt to
define its underlying features by a neo-reactionary)
but, broadly speaking, they tend to be defined by their:

Rejection of universalism and egalitarianism.

Preference for particularist politics over
universalist politics (that is, they ‘accept’ that different people flourish
under different forms of government, such as, but not limited to: monarchy,
aristocracy, ‘a limited form of politea’
or a corporate-state.

Though the
movements ideological genealogy can be largely traced back to one 'Mencius Moldbug' the phrase ‘The Dark Enlightenment’ itself is an invention of rogue philosopher Nick Land (I advise the reader to cast their eyes over Land’s original manifesto, as
well as his previous essays-
as much as you might disagree with what he has to say, one cannot deny that he
is an interesting thinker, however misguided). Largely, TDE want to see a
return to ‘traditional’ societies, while often also embracing modern technology
(‘archeo-futurism’ is the rather pleasing expression they use), on the
insistence that these forms of hierarchical, if not outright feudal, societies
are the most natural expressions of humanity. They emphasise the differences
between human beings, particularly as these manifest between ‘races,’ and their
opposition to the present, modernist world-order, ‘The Cathedral.’

This post
won’t be a general critique of TDE, as such a thing is far beyond my powers
(though another's attempt at that can be found here),
rather, I am going to ask one question, focusing on a particular issue.

Should we
talk to them about ‘race’?

*

When it
comes to race and ethnicity, TDE insists that it is simply being ‘realistic.’
We accept that genetics play a role in the development of every other species, so why not also our own? This perspective,
which they call ‘Human Biodiversity,’ or HBD, holds that racial differences
between human beings is more than just skin deep. Rather, different types of human being have evolved, and this is
reflected by their societies. For example, Middle Eastern societies tend to be organised along tribal principles. Societies in
the Far East tend to be very focused on homogeneity and obedience, while in the
West competition and individuality are held in high esteem, and so on.

Why are we so insistent that
heredity doesn’t play a role in the diversity of these societies? Why do we
insist that the only origin of social difference is culture, choice, and
perhaps fate/chance? At most, we might be willing to admit that environment and
even climate might play a role, but why are we so afraid that inherited,
genetic differences might cause a certain ethnic group to favour individualism,
while another will favour the family?

Such are the questions that they
ask.

Now, perhaps with clenched fists
and through gritted teeth, we do have
to admit that we cannot reject the possibility
that heredity plays some role in
social diversity out of hand, however
difficult that is to say. I ask the reader to look over that sentence once more
before they continue, to be sure that they understood what I am saying here. I
am not saying they are right, nor that ‘progressives’ are wrong. I am merely
admitting that, yes, strictly speaking we cannot reject the possibility that
heredity is a non-negligible factor in societal development a priori.

I will grant them this, they are
entirely right to say that we live in a society where people feel
‘uncomfortable’ when discussing race, even in abstracted forms…

As I said above, TDE insist that
they are being scientific about the question of race. And…well, they’re not.
They’re just not. I will admit that it is not beyond the realms of possibility
that we haven’t paid enough attention to genetics when it comes to human
development on a macro-social scale, and a more
thorough social science, which includes a look at heredity, might be desirable. But, for the most part, neo-reactionaries seem to just use the claim that
‘traditional societies where right about some stuff’ and 'we need to have a proper debate about race-realism' to, very conveniently,
justify their own prejudices. Indeed, there is a vast difference between
admitting the possible importance of heredity and then insisting that it
primarily manifests racially (and sexually, we must not forget the often
outright misogyny of this movement!).

However, an interesting
opportunity might have been inadvertently presented to us here: like I said,
TDE claim to be scientific, and put a great deal of statistics forward to back this claim up. Their interpretations are dubious at best,
which suggests that if we, deploying a rational and more truly scientific
apparatus than theirs, were to confront them with overwhelming facts to the
contrary (even if we do, under the weight of incontrovertible evidence, end up
accepting that we’ve underestimated the role of heredity, it hardly means that
no other factor is important, nor is it say that it would even be the most important developmental factor),
wouldn’t they have to accept this?

I like to think that, in such a
situation, at least some of the more
sophisticated neo-reactionaries would relent to the contrary point, the more
intellectually honest ones at least. But, it would most likely be a lost cause.
As I’ve said, for the most part, I imagine that many of them had already made
up their minds about race and gender long
before Moldbug and Land appeared on the scene.

This, then,
begs another question: should we talk to them at all?

*

Do we run
the risk of tacitly legitimising a view point when we agree to debate with it?
Consider climate change: the evidence that human activity is the primary driver
of present climatological changes is overwhelming. And yet, we see an odd
insistence by the media, particularly but not exclusively in America, that we
should treat this as a ‘debate’ of some kind. In so doing, we run the risk of
making the opposition lobby look respectable.

There is a
serious point here. Moldbug made a comment about white supremacists that could
be well used to describe TDE itself: ‘I can imagine one possibility which might
make white nationalism genuinely dangerous. White nationalism would be
dangerous if there was some issue on which white nationalists were right, and
everyone else was wrong. Truth is always dangerous. Contrary to common belief,
it does not always prevail. But it’s always a bad idea to turn your back on it.
…While the evidence for human cognitive biodiversity is indeed debatable,
what’s not debatable is that it is debatable …[even though] everyone who is not
a white nationalist has spent the last 50 years informing us that it is not
debatable …’ (Land’s own edits)

How do we
deal with this? If we attempt to have a ‘serious discussion about HBD’ with
them in order to prove them wrong, we might make them seem credible by agreeing to the debate at all. On the other hand, what if we do the opposite? What if we
ignore them, or even make a point of our refusal to co-operate with them? What
happens here? Arguably, we run the same risk as before: tacitly legitimising a
view point, but what is even worse is that by insisting that it remain
unacknowledged we make it look subversive.

A few years
ago, in the UK, we were all rather worried by the British National Party (BNP),
a far-right party who were suddenly doing quite well, not enough for them to
have a serious chance of seeing an MP in the Commons, but the presence of three
members of the BNP in the European Parliament certainly spooked the left,
centre and right. Things died down, the BNP has again faded into obscurity (and
now we’re all deathly worried by the bizarre spectacle that is the United
Kingdom Independence Party, but I digress), but that wasn’t before their party
Leader, Nick Griffin, appeared on the flagship debate programme Question Time.
Things didn’t go too well for him, but that to one side, should he have been
allowed on there at all? Didn't his inclusion suggest that he had something to say...?

Žižek,
with his usual panache, makes a good point here. Isn’t it a little worrying that we are even considering having a conversation about
‘race-realism’ again? Of course, you might respond to this by pointing out that
TDE isn’t exactly well known, but it is still worrying that a group who openly
argue in favour of concepts of racial hierarchy and inequality are beginning to
come across as even slightly respectable, particularly when we find ourselves being
forced to concede them points, even if they are largely only academic. The
point, however, is not confined to the neo-reactionaries alone, it is
something that all of us who are politically aware must consider: how do we
respond to the Fascists today? Do we ignore them, and hope they burn
themselves out, or do we confront them and run the risk of rendering them
respectable?

Wednesday, 14 May 2014

I
recently had the veritable pleasure of watching Tom Hardy in a car doing an
extended impression of Anthony Hopkins. Slightly unconvincing Welsh accents
aside, Locke (dir. Steven Knight) was
possibly the best film I’ve seen at the cinema all year, and Tom Hardy’s screen
presence was engrossing, as was the simply beautiful cinematography. But, me
being me, I did spend much of the film and the crème de menthe accompanied
conversation afterwards considering the philosophical themes present.

Hardy,
who is the only character we see on screen, plays Ivan Locke, a ‘concrete
farmer,’ a builder who specialises in laying foundations. He has just finished
work the night before a major consignment of concrete is due to arrive, with
which he is to lay the foundations for a new skyscraper. However, our hero made
an error of judgement some months ago and got a woman named Bethen (voiced by
the ever-delightful Olivia Colman in their phone conversations) pregnant.
Trouble is, he already has a wife, and Bethen has just gone into premature
labour before he is able to tell her what has happened. An interesting point of
discussion might be whether-or-not he ever intended to tell her, we do only
have his word on this, but perhaps we should leave that question to one side.

Locke
is one of the most fiercely moral characters I can recall ever seeing on the
film screen. We might, perhaps, begin to think of the noble heroes of many fine
and entertaining films, risking everything for the sake of right, but Ivan
Locke is just a man, a normal man. He has a wife, a job and two kids. He has
the air of the everyman about him. This is where his power as a character lies,
his utterly ordinary life and personality mingled with an extraordinary sense
of morality and duty.

The film
follows Locke’s conversations over the phone in his car, as well as slightly
badly judged conversations with the imaginary ghost of his late father (these
asides, though essential in many ways, could have been handled better in my
humble opinion). Over the phone, he is simultaneously attempting to hold his
family together while breaking to his wife the news of his sole infidelity
(again, we only have his word for this but I am inclined to believe him…call me
gullible), organising his work team to be in a position to deal with the
approaching consignment of concrete, and reassuring the mother of his
illegitimate child that he’ll be there as soon as he can be.

And, in so
doing, he more-or-less ruins his life. His wife tells him he isn’t welcome back
home and, because he has abandoned them when they need him the most (it will be
the largest non-military or nuclear concrete delivery in Europe), he gets the
sack.

I feel that
there are two principle questions to be asked about the character of Locke:

1.Is this a spontaneous ethical act or simply a reaction?

2.Is this the right thing to do, and if so, why?

Originally, I was also going to
address a third question, ‘Is Locke simply a narcissist?’ but, as this post has
already trundled on past the 1,300 word mark, that might be left for another
time.

*

Throughout,
Locke is struggling with freedom and destiny. We learn through his imaginary
conversations with his father that he himself is illegitimate, that he was
unwanted by his father (who he never even met until he was in his 20s). This
begs the question- is Locke’s single-minded, uncompromising determination to
see right by this woman and their child an authentic (used in the existential
sense) act or is he just being propelled by the sins of his father? Or, more
properly, by an overwhelming desire to prove to the world that he is not his father? He certainly makes a
point of how much he wishes that he could show his father how unlike him he is,
telling his wife that he is doing exactly the opposite of what his own father
did, making sure that he is there to deal with his ‘fuck up,’ as he puts it.
Wording it in such a way certainly suggests that he has little affection for
the potential child, but having an appropriate emotional response is not the
entirety of the ethical act.

All this
being said, however, we need not necessarily view Locke as simply reacting to
the ghosts of his past, entirely motivated by outside agency (‘fallen’, to use
Heidegger’s turn of phrase); rather, we can read his actions as being a
transcendental ethical act, in which he risks everything to do the right thing because he has first-hand experience of how
damaging doing wrong in this situation is. At one point he tells one of his
co-workers about the importance of ensuring that the right kind of concrete is
used in the foundation, as a flaw at the beginning of the structure will become
a flaw with the whole thing: the parallels here ought to be obvious to the
reader.

*

Locke has
found himself in an impossible position. His ethical duties are pulling him in
a variety of different directions, and it is going to be a tremendous amount of
work to satisfy the demands that the Good is making on him. He must,
simultaneously, do right by: his wife, his unwanted child and his employers
(perhaps, more properly, his co-workers). The most frequent ethical act we see
Locke engaging in is his almost naïve honesty (he seems virtually unaware of
the difference between telling his wife he had sex with another woman and
telling her that it isn’t a road closure he’s arranging for work, but a
‘stop-and-go’!); he insists on telling people the truth to an almost absurd
degree. For example, when Bethen asks him if he loves her he responds by saying
‘No, how can I? I don’t know you.’ Interestingly, he gives this same response
when she asks if he hates her…

Does he do
the right thing?

I would
argue that what needs to be recognised is that he is in a situation where no
action can satisfy all parties. Every course of action he can take is
ultimately going to result in someone being harmed: if he goes home to watch
the footy with his sons and wife, and goes to work the next day, he has let
down a woman he did wrong by (though he frequently tells us that he only slept
with her out of pity, itself an at least ethically ambiguous action) and a
child he is responsible for. In this regard, the film resembles the
often-marched-out thought experiments of moral philosophy lectures. ‘If pulling
the lever dooms one man but saves three, ought I do it?’ The simplistic answer
the baser Utilitarians offer us (although, I’m not sure I’ve ever met one who
was entirely comfortable with answering such a question, which I personally
take as a good sign for their ethical development) is that ‘Yes, in such a
situation the right thing to do is to end the life of one to save the lives of
many.’

That we
express discomfort at this formula is evidence enough that treating moral issues
in such a simplistic way is at least an incomplete
approach, or that it warrants further discussion if nothing else (I reiterate
my point that I have doubts that any morally-healthy adult would be wholly comfortable
with the ‘logical’ solution, but that opens a whole new can of philosophical
worms…), though that is not say that the hedonic calculus ought never to be
deployed. However, I fear we are digressing from the topic at hand. This is a
glorified film review, not a Prolegomena to Any Future Moral Philosophy.

I do not
have an answer to the question ‘Does Locke do the right thing?’, and I don’t
believe that an answer is actually available for that question. Morality is not
a matter of reducing situations to easily quantifiable pleasure-pain ratios.
That Locke causes more people immediate grief than he would if he had ignored
Bethen is simply not the end of the story here (nor is it when we start talking
about long-term felicity, the actions of the agent in the moment warrant the attention of the philosopher). There are
moral demands made upon us by life, in all its sticky, smelly, messy ambiguity,
than any single ethical theory is ever likely to render as a simple formula. Locke as a film might be spoken of as
being about the impossibility of the purely ‘right’ action, and this is its
philosophical interest and importance.

Thursday, 8 May 2014

It is an assumption in some
quarters that one must either be fully supportive or completely condemnatory of
technology, with very little room left for the middle ground. One either hears
the incessant songs of individuals and corporations lauding technology in a
quasi-messianic form, or one hears the equally incessant songs of those who
condemn technology as demonic. Why must we only deal with absolutes and
extremes? Is there room for a critique that falls between condemnation and
celebration?

My motivation for writing this piece
comes from the video Look Up, and thus will focus on social media.

Now this is, ultimately, a
harmless triviality (we shan’t dwell on the obvious irony of a video that
condemns social media out-of-hand becoming widely watched due to that very
technology), but it is emblematic of a deeper and far more worrying trend: it
often seems that the only people willing to engage in critiques of technology
and modernity are fools or, perhaps worse, outright reactionaries.

*

‘All distances in time and space
are shrinking. Places that a person previously reached after weeks and months
on the road are now reached by airplane overnight. What a person previously
received news of only after years, if at all, is now experienced hourly over
the radio in no time. The germination and flourishing of plants that remained
concealed through the seasons, film now exhibits in a single minute. Film shows
the distant cities of the most ancient civilisations as if they stood as this
very moment amidst today’s street traffic.’ –Martin Heidegger

We might
add to this: ‘And now information technology allows for people with whom we
would never speak ready access to our lives, to retain connections that would
be otherwise sundered, and to engage with and experience cultures on the far
side of the world.’

At a first
glance, the above might seem to be an unambiguous praise of the miracles of
technology, but we must not let ourselves be deceived: Heidegger’s relationship
with technology is most certainly not
one of ready praise, it is one of suspicion…but not outright hostility either.
In his own words: ‘Technology is not
demonic, but its essence is mysterious.’ [own emphasis] The spirit of this
expression may, perhaps, be expounded as follows: we are as mistaken in
assuming that technology is out-right evil as we are that it will save the
world. There are, of course, subtleties to this statement that are lost by my
literalising paraphrase (to borrow an expression from Graham Harman), and I
advise the reader to find a copy of Heidegger’s essay The Question Concerning Technology to appreciate what is meant by
both ‘technology’ and ‘essence,’ but for our immediate purposes, we can read
the above loosely.

*

Before we
continue with the more abstract points, let us first discuss the video itself.
Questions of its quality aside (personally, I found it laughably trite and
obvious), what are the main points to extract here? That social media
technology has forced us apart under the guise of bringing us together, that we
have lost the simple relationship of the face-to-face and the spontaneity of
meeting new people. Now, as is often the case, there is partial truth to all
these points (there’s partial truth to most points).

We should
not disguise the problems that social media (or any form of technology)
creates, this much is obvious. But, neither must we try and hide from the benefits
it provides. I will here direct the reader to this excellent article for a
similar discussion of ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ of modernity.

Of course,
social media now means that instead of going out and speaking with one’s
friends it is now an option to simply send them a Facebook message. It is also
an option to use Facebook to arrange to meet them face-to-face. Both of these
options are always available to us.
Facebook hasn’t killed personal relationships, though I would not say that it
has necessarily enhanced them either. Rather, it has given us access to new forms of relationships which were
previously impossible. I can, do, and hope to continue to maintain
relationships with people I care about using social media. I have had
friendships begin thanks to this new form of technology. You might respond:
‘Well, you could always write letters to your friends, or phone them, if you
want to continue these relationships afar!’

It is, of course, not a case of saying that all the
‘net has done is allow for a more efficient form of communication than the post,
as no form of technology is ‘neutral’ in that way. But the fact of the matter is,
as put very well in the article mentioned above, thanks to social media
relationships that would have been impossible
beforehand are now readily available to be explored. No, having a friend you’ve
never met in person, who you know from a forum or a Facebook group, is not the same
thing as having a pen-pal you’ve never met, but
that is not to say that it is therefore of less worth. It is of different worth, of different value.

The real
problem, and this is what the video is touching on but fails to properly engage
with (drowning its point in sentiment and bad poetry), is that we might lose
forms of relationship that we had previously, forms of relationship that we
ought to protect. The danger that technology poses for Heidegger, and I am
inclined to agree with him here, is that the mind-set that technology (here
understood to include also science- again, I recommend you read his essay on
the subject) conceals from us other potential ways of revealing the world and
other people. It shuts off old forms of relationship even as it opens the way
to new ones.

We must,
however, remember that Heidegger tells us that the essence of technology is not
demonic but mysterious. The last
words on what technology means for us
are still yet to be uttered.

And a viral
video on YouTube most certainly won’t help us venture closer to them.

About Me

Any views or opinions presented are mine and not those of my employer. I may chose to discuss things, people and ideas that are unsavoury to others -- this should not be read as an endorsement of these things, ideas or people unless said so explicitly.